Nectarine pie

Before I left town for the weekend I decided to leave my wife with a homemade pie.  I started working off of this SmittenKitchen recipe for peach creme fraiche pie, slowly acquiring the ingredients and secreting them in the kitchen so as not to spoil the surprise.  Oh, I used nectarines instead of peaches, because they looked marginally less despondent at the grocery store.  And our oven is on the cold side, so it took forever to bake.  And please remember that other than the cherry slab pie pictured in the banner right now, I'm pretty sure this is the first pie I've ever baked.  But it wasn't so bad, really.  I might conquer this fear of baking yet!

How to puree an entire watermelon

The first time I pureed an entire watermelon, it was in the course of making Smitten Kitchen's watermelon lemonade (which was almost as fantastic as Deb's pictures look).  For our housecooling party, we decided to make aguas frescas, so it seemed like another pureed watermelon was in order.

Now, that first pureed watermelon was definitely harder than I expected.  The chief difficulty is that we don't have a blender, only a cuisinart food processor.  Food processors can do almost anything blenders can, except deal neatly with large quantities of liquid.  Well let me tell you:  a pureed watermelon is a large quantity of liquid.

This time around, I had a flash of insight-- the immersion blender we had just gotten as a wedding present!  No problem.  The only hard thing I foresaw was cutting all that melon off the rind.  [That problem, it turned out was easily solved-- just cut the melon in thick, round slices with a big chef's knife, and then cut the rind away from the outside.]

However, I had accidentally bought a melon that was not seedless.  This required a colander and a lot of paper towels.  [See right.]  We left a bunch of the watermelon to strain and went off to see a movie, and it worked pretty well.  I squeezed a bunch of the pulp through the paper towels at the end to make sure we weren't missing too much of the good stuff.

So, learn from my many mistakes!

How to puree an entire watermelon:

1. Buy a seedless watermelon.
   
2. Cut it into slices with a big knife.
3. Cut the rind off of each slice and throw it away.
4. Roughly chop the watermelon flesh and put it in a big bowl.
5. Attack it mercilessly with an immersion blender.
6. Strain it only if you are the kind of killjoy who won't accept pulp in your orange juice.
7. Enjoy!

Nothing fancy

Breakfast, and no it's not barley:

Bento

I am charmed by this New York Times trend story on bento boxes, and also vaguely pleased to say that I have friends who were in to bento boxes long before the Times picked up on them.  But it's a little odd that the phenomenon--as reported, anyway--combines two very different things.  One is having a convenient compartmentalized carrying case for bringing your lunch to work or school.  If you don't just bring a wrapped sandwich or a single big tupperware of pasta or stew or salad, it can be difficult to pack all of the pieces of your lunch in a reasonable way.  [My usual solution the past two years has just been to bring a ridiculous array of tupperwares and plastic bags, and my co-clerks were polite enough to keep their snickering to themselves.]  I liked the look of "Bento 2.0" from laptop lunches, which also seemed to have a good combination of compartment sizes.
The other half of the trend is cutting fruits, vegetables, and other foods into cute little cartoon-like shapes, or decorating them with little plastic thingies.  I find this just bizarre, although if it inculcates a love of fruits and vegetables I suppose I have no real complaints.

Quote of the Day

"[T]here is no reason home cooks shouldn't regularly be curing their own bacon."
That is Michael Ruhlmann, and here is my source.  It is comforting to know that there is a whole level of home-cooking-geekery that is totally foreign to me.  [I resisted the temptation to give this post the obvious title.]

A personal endorsement

Raffi laments:

"I never thought I'd say this, but I need those glass canisters one gets at places like Crate & Barrel."

Allow me to sing the praises of the Oxo POP container:

1. They're plastic, not glass, so they're lighter and they don't break.
2. The pop-up lid really is both easy-to-use and air-tight.
3. They have wide mouths (the width of the container), unlike most glass canisters, so you can actually reach a measuring scoop into them.  (Pouring flour out of a canister into a waiting measuring cup on the counter or over a bowl is a recipe for mess and disaster.)
4. They come in big sizes-- big enough for a big sack of flour.
5. They're not that expensive.

Ever since a terrible moth infestation that still makes us shudder, I've sworn by them.

Microwaving metal

I had always learned that you can't put metal in the microwave or else disastrous things will happened. Well, not quite "always"-- I grew up habitually putting my fork or spoon in the bowl I was microwaving and not really thinking anything of it (and with nothing bad ever happening). I always assumed this was some magical property of my parents' microwave.

Anyway, opening the microwave this afternoon, I discovered that ours has a metal rack in it. Like, built into the sides. As if it's supposed to be there. A little amateur internet research turned up conflicting authorities. Mythbusters apparently says its pretty much ok to microwave metal. The FDA recommends against it. This anonymous soul on the internet attempts to square the circle:

"When the metal is thick, smooth, with rounded edges--that metal rack--the moving electrons can bounce around freely while rarely hitting another metal atom."

Huh!